Documentary Report

There is a certain age at which a child looks at you in all earnestness and delivers a long, pleased speech in all the true inflections of spoken English, but with not one recognizable syllable. There is no way you can tell the child that if language had been a melody, he had mastered it and done well, but that since it was in fact a sense, he had botched it utterly. ~Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

Language is great gift that God has bestowed upon us as it helps us to communicate our needs, desires, ideas, etc. A few months after we are born, we start acquiring this gift and by the time we are toddlers, we are able to speak many sentences by using words from our ever increasing reservoir of vocabulary. In a child, this ability to string full sentences together is acquired after undergoing stages of language development starting from babyhood. The stages include cooing and babbling, one word stage, two word stage, developing morphology, developing syntax etc. And these are not undergone automatically but “the language a child learns from and attends to is the speech of significant persons in his world, addressed to each other and to him” so in other words a child acquires language with the help of his caretakers ( mother, father, teachers) etc.
As the child gradually participates in the social interaction he learns “communicative competence, i.e. the unconscious, tacit knowledge that underlies speech behavior--knowledge of both the language and the social world”. Every child has communicative competence but also “has to learn how to use linguistic structures appropriately”. For this purpose, caretakers especially mothers play a big role because they tend to use “caregiver speech” which is a “simplified speech style adopted by someone who spends a lot of time interacting with a young child” and it is observed that “several characteristics of caregiver speech (e.g. utterance length, use of pronouns) significantly predicted later child speech”
Apart from the role of caregivers, various external mediums such as television, children books and nursery rhymes help children to learn their words and acquire language. It has been shown that “there is a strong relation between children's phonological skills and the progress that they make in reading”. But there is some uncertainty whether this is a specific connection or whether it is just a by-product of variations in general language ability. Also awareness of rhyme makes a distinctive contribution by helping children to form spelling categories during their speech development stages. When it comes to sentence formation, researchers argue that the concept of a sentence is innately available to children and is the "main guiding principle in a child's attempt to organize and interpret the linguistic evidence that fluent speakers make available to him."

The documentary we produced basically provides a visual representation of the stages discussed above, the use of caregiver and baby talk, the impact of television on children’s linguistic behavior and the use of rhyming and reading as a tool to help children grasp the language effectively.
We started off by seeking appointments from two institutions catering children, one was a daycare at our university and the other was a school cum daycare facility called the Apples Grooming School in G-11.
Our first day was spent by interacting with the children in the playgroup and nursery and the teachers at Apples. We interviewed the language teachers whose names are Sehrish Mirza, Amber Javed and Lamia Rahani and they explained the methods that they adopt to teach children to speak words and sentences. They spoke about the use of images and rhymes as tools in helping children acquire language also discussed the transition of their syllabus from phonetic alphabets to the learning of three letter words. We also documented some children who were singing rhymes in their music class and interacting with their teachers and caregivers.
The second day was “car wash day” for the playgroup at Apples; we visited all the classes from kindergarten to grade three and photographed and documented children and their teachers interacting in various fun filled sessions. Every child seemed to think that singing the ABC is equivalent of singing a poem which made us contemplate the impact of rhyming on children’s language development, Due to time shortage we could not study the impact of television of children’s linguistic abilities so we decided to shift our focus to the importance of rhyming on children’s speech. We also interviewed the headmistress of Apples, Mrs. Nuzhat Sohail who explained the step by step evolution of a child’s word forming abilities.
On the third day, we visited NUST daycare where we interviewed the teacher of junior Montessori and the in charge of the daycare. We were informed that the place caters for children as young as four weeks and as old as four years. We toured the place and took photographs then met a teacher called Ms Sehrish who explained the transitions that she observed in the children’s speech from the pre babbling stage till the time they were able to answer “what” and “who” questions completely. She also talked of the significance of caregiver speech and stressed that the caregiver must make clear and complete sounds in order to be understood by the child.
Along with our visits to the above mentioned places, we also met Dr. Uzma Mansoor who is a speech therapist at Allama Iqbal Open University and she gave a detailed overview of the stages involved in speech development of children. She first spoke of the cooing stage and described it as an initial way through which a child communicates with the mother. Then she described the babbling stage that starts when the child is six months old. The significance of this stage is that the child starts “playing with sounds” and produces a string of babbles such as bababa and gagaga etc. She further explained the formation of one words and two words in the child’s speech and the gradual increase of meaningful words in the child’s vocabulary by the time he/she reaches the age of two and a half.

Apart from footage of the places we documented, we also included videos of Afiya Awais and her son Mustafa in which she spiritedly describes the stages of communication her son has gone through.
On the whole our effort was to provide a lively documentary that would visually depict the topics of the chapter “First language acquisition” that we studied in our textbook “the Study of Language” by George Yule. And we hope that we have succeeded in the effort.